France,
1998, 58 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Dominique Abel
- prod
-
Pierre Olivier Bardet
- scr
-
Dominique Abel
- cam
-
Jean-Yves Escoffier
- editor
-
Christine Benoit
- source
-
Idéale Audience, 6, rue de l’Agent Bailly, 75009 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-53-20-14-01
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Television—Arts
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Screened with You Are What You Were Born For. Dominique Abel in person.
OTHER
The weathered face of Agujetas says it all. This slender tree trunk of a man seems to have grown out of the rocky soil of his native Jerez, Spain like the disfigured bushes and jagged boulders that dot the landscape. His father, Manuel Torre, was a great cantaor—a flamenco singer—before him. A former blacksmith who began singing at the age of eight in local bars, Agujetas is now a flamenco legend. In a trance, he sings of pain, suffering, fate and bad blood; his music “cuts you like a knife.” Illiterate (“Those who read and write can’t sing flamenco”), he composes the lyrics and melodies and keeps them in his head, estimating that he could sing for several days without repeating himself. When he gets together with guitarist Moraito, whose fingers glide over the strings of his guitar like a dancer, the result is compelling, strange, like music from another world. The crowd knows how to keep the complex flamenco beat with hand claps, and they know just when to let out a well-timed shout. Dominique Abel’s powerful film is the essence of flamenco, hurtling out images as rough, otherwordly and undefinable as the cantaor’s songs.
—Miguel Pendás
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
